Subgenre: Supernatural | Religious Horror
Underlying Element: possession | demons
Director: Scott Derrickson
Synopsis:
This movie is about a cop fighting possessed criminals with the help of a priest and preventing evil from taking over the city.
Analysis:
Deliver Us From Evil (2014) is not your typical exorcism movie. It is inspired by actual events. Although it involves a priest, the events happen on the streets and in ordinary people's lives.
As with all exorcism movies, there is a great deal of blood, gore, neck bending, and limb twisting in this one. There are a lot of jump scares here and there throughout the movie. In almost all of the dark scenes or when the lights suddenly turn off, you can anticipate a really good scare.
The good thing about this movie is that there is not just one, but three people being possessed at the same time, compared to most exorcism movies, which only feature one.
In terms of actual demon expulsion, this is probably the quickest ever performed in a movie. The six stages of exorcism are explained thoroughly, which is good, but in a horror movie, audiences are expecting more action between the exorcist and the possessed. Not to mention that the exorcism scene happened abruptly towards the end.
The only problem is that this movie focused more on crime fighting and was not able to give the priest proper character development. There are a lot of loopholes and unanswered questions.
Overall, this exorcist movie has increasing tension and an interesting storyline but lacks showing more evil. Though it is said to be based on actual events, the way it is presented is not mind-blowing enough.
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